Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by ChrisLTD on Saturday March 03, 2012 @10:02PM (#3661804)

I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to DDG after Google started pushing Plus in their search results.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by ww520 on Saturday March 03, 2012 @11:25PM (#3661964)

It's Google privacy, or lack of, that drove me to DDG. I clicked on a Youtube video link on Reddit the other day and it asked me to verify my age. I didn't have a Youtube account! Then I remember it's after March 1 and Google is using my GMail account for Youtube. I didn't create a Youbute account because I don't want to. No thanks. I don't want my video watching or search being tracked.

No thanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by repsilat on Sunday March 04, 2012 @01:51AM (#3662177)

This is off-topic, sorry, but if you change the youtube link from /watch?v=CODE to /v/CODE you usually get a working full-window player without an age verification prompt. You lose the often insightful comments of the youtube community, though, so it's not all roses.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by ranit8 on Sunday March 04, 2012 @07:28PM (#3664745)

Thanks man, I can't upvote this enough. I stumbled on the video posted in [1] and now I can watch it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3637983

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by Bockit on Sunday March 04, 2012 @02:23AM (#3662232)

Just a preface, I'm giving this anecdotally, not claiming it to be the cause.

I was at a birthday lunch the other Sunday and it was an extended family kind of event, when my mum, who is considerably computer illiterate, was talking about DuckDuckGo. You can imagine my surprise, DDG to me has always been something of a geek's search engine.

Apparently it had been covered by the morning news, as a viable alternative to google. Not only this, the segment was apparently recommending people opt out of google tracking their usage, brought about by the recent privacy changes.

I don't know if you consider their privacy policy change a recent gaffe, but I would consider that story to be an indirect result of those changes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by stcredzero on Saturday March 03, 2012 @10:57PM (#3661908)

I'm curious how much DDG's traffic has grown as a direct result of Google's perceived gaffes in the last few months.

It's not Google gaffes, but unavailability that's been driving my DDG use. Whenever google.com fails to resolve in DNS for me, or Google's server fails to respond, I switch to DDG. Unfortunately, events like this have been happening frequently of late.

I'm on Comcast in Houston. Anyone else experiencing this?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by JS_startup on Saturday March 03, 2012 @11:58PM (#3662031)

You're not the only one. I counted three occasions just in the last week when an attempted Google visit timed out, yet DDG and Bing worked fine. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes at Google.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by wcchandler on Saturday March 03, 2012 @11:21PM (#3661955)

I wasn't sure if that was DNS resolution or simply Google "forwarding" that was slow. Either way it has been fairly annoying -- almost to the point that I'm loading cached pages and looking on that page for a direct link.

I don't think ISP is playing a role as I experience similar results at $HOME and $WORK which are on 2 completely different networks/backbones.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by rahulcap on Sunday March 04, 2012 @04:10AM (#3662396)

Yeah, I've been having lots of issues with google search and gmail lately. I thought it was me since I did not see people complaining on twitter.

If this is happening to more people, why haven't people been talking about it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by calpaterson on Sunday March 04, 2012 @12:54AM (#3662105)

I switched because I was unhappy about being bubbled.

http://dontbubble.us/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by orbitingpluto on Sunday March 04, 2012 @02:34AM (#3662245)

Ditto: Google Truthiness.

And the new privacy policy drove me away.

And !mysql is so much quicker than site:mysql.com.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by MatthewPhillips on Saturday March 03, 2012 @10:40PM (#3661871)

It's a legitimate reason to switch. I first became skeptical of Google when they released the awful Blog Search. Here was a search company, with a growing market being neglected and their entry was an absolute dud. This was around the same time that they were releasing a lot of non-search products. I wondered where their priorities were then, and today there is no doubt.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by literalusername on Sunday March 04, 2012 @04:23AM (#3662408)

I switched to DDG after Google started giving me 500 server errors in every web search, complete with a request to send a bug report to an email address that turns out to be undeliverable. That was about 3 weeks ago, and I've been generally much happier with DDG (despite the standard caveat of subpar search results).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Duck Duck Go's traffic has tripled in 2012 by jeltz on Sunday March 04, 2012 @01:37PM (#3663455)

In the traffic graph there seems to be a distinct correlation between the changed privacy policy and the start of the rapid growth. Did Google not announce it in early or mid January?

Myself I have long thought of switching from Google due to their annoying UI changes and their lack of regard of user privacy, but this change privacy policy was the thing that finally motivated me to switch.

[ Parent | on HN ]